What is the Democratic Party? What Could It Be?

25:23This is Maurice Shema, host of The Last 12 Weeks, a new podcast from Serial Productions, The Marshall Project, and The New York Times. A couple of years back, I got an email from a defense lawyer who wanted me to write about his client. The client, David Wood, was on death row in Texas. Had been there for more than 30 years. The lawyer was writing because David Wood had lost all of his appeals. He was set to be executed. The lawyer's plan to stop the execution was to try and prove something that nobody had successfully done in three decades. That one of Texas' most notorious serial killers was actually innocent.

26:00It wasn't that the lawyers didn't have a case to make. I know two people fabricated testimony to get a guy executed. It's just that they had so little time to make it. The last 12 weeks. Listen wherever you get your podcasts.

26:25What do you think about the way that foreign policy is becoming more of a litmus test in some of these primaries? So the way you sort of framed the party there was that there's a tremendous amount of agreement on affordability, right? You have everyone from Zoran Mamdani running on making New York cheaper to Roy Cooper in North Carolina. I think his slogan is make stuff costs less. I agree that there's actually a lot of unity directionally on that, even if the different factions in the party have different ways of approaching how you make things cheaper. Israel and Gaza are not that way. And I think it's one reason those fights have been proving much more combative, at times much uglier.

27:06They've become more a question of a moral litmus test. That's the kind of thing that is more dangerous for a party when the issues reflect not a disagreement on how to achieve a shared goal, but a fundamental disagreement on not just what the goal is, but who is moral and who is immoral in it. So, you know, as you're watching it play out, as you're counseling people how to navigate it, how do you see it? I think the fundamental thing is that there is a change. There's been change over years and decades and much more change recently in the realities on the ground that people are seeing play out, the horrors and the human suffering.

27:46There could be a big change in Israeli politics that could twerk and potentially change this yet again. But it's healthy to have debates when those kinds of changes play out. The Democratic Party has had huge changes in foreign policy approach. We've had much bigger, deeper divisions over the Vietnam War, for example, a generation or two ago. And having a party that actually has a conversation about this, there are times when the conversation can be so vicious and extreme or even violent. Those things I do not like. And I think we should all fully oppose any kind of violence and political disagreements.

28:21The point of democracy is to be able to settle conflicts nonviolently. But there are both issues of identity and issues of morality and basic deep fundamental divides that are being hashed out. And that's part of why I think it's actually good to have a democratic process where those things can happen, where people can have those debates and they can decide how central that's going to be to their vote. And they can figure out how to draw a circle that includes enough people to be able to both win and feel comfortable living inside that circle. And there will be another side of it, a new circle that's drawn that has the vast majority of Democrats and finds a path forward.

28:59And my hope, my deep hope is that that's a future that allows thriving and life and self-determination for Israelis and Palestinians alike. This is a moment where people have watched unimaginable horrors be inflicted on people who manifestly do not deserve it. And different people have seen different horrors on their screens based on which algorithmic bubble they're in. But the question of how the United States should conduct its foreign policy in the wake of that is absolutely a legitimate thing for a democracy to think through. For better or worse right now, there are two major viable parties in the country, and it is healthy for contests of different ideas to happen within the party, within primaries, and then to have a chance to elect very different types of Democrats in different places.

29:42This is a giant, incredibly diverse country. People are going to disagree about a whole bunch of different things. And for me, I think the Democratic Party is better if the tent is wide. So to come with this from maybe a different angle rather than get you to weigh in on primaries you're not going to weigh in on. Appreciate it. What is your theory of the median voter? Do you believe in a median voter? Do you believe in the median voter theorem? How do you think about the people you were trying to win over in Wisconsin? So I start with the fact that maybe 90 % of voters already know who they're going to support even before they know who the candidates are.

30:17So then you ask, who are the remaining 10 %? In a state like Wisconsin, there's a huge amount of polling that suggests that there is roughly 10 % in play. And the counterintuitive thing is that the people who might vote for either party have a lot in common with the people who are on the fence about whether to vote at all. What sometimes voters and swing voters have in common is that they don't think about politics all the time. Politics feels very distant, feels like something that happens over there and they live over here. They live in their real life and all these explosive squabbles between the two parties is just noise.

30:54If you knock on the doors of those voters, what you find is people who have a bunch of opinions that don't neatly align with either political party that are not how they define their identities. They define their identities based on their role in their family or their role in their job or the team that they love or the hobby that they throw themselves passionately into. They have deeply held values and deeply held views, but politics is just not their jam. And if you want to persuade that voter to side with you, you have to show them that you care about them, that you like them, that you have common sense, you get how the world works, you get what they care about.

31:28You're not, you don't have some blinkered wild opinion that they think kind of disqualifies you, but also your priorities are the things that they care about in their day-to-day life. And if you can do that, if you can enter that kind of circle of trust, then you can make the case for this or that solution. If they think this person doesn't get me, is not on my side, wants something from me, then they're just not going to listen to your message at all. How much do you understand the way voters like that or non-voters like that, for that matter, assess politics as being they have their kind of set of issue positions in their head and, you know, what they do and don't like?

32:08And maybe that's more, you know, jumbled together than the parties would like to have it. Right. You can have somebody who believes in, you know, full on marijuana legalization and, you know, believes in, you know, universal health care, but it's also pro-life. Absolutely. There are a lot of voters. And you get that all the time. You get that all the time. There are a lot of voters that just don't fit the way the parties have grouped what goes with what. When those voters are sort of assembling the picture of the world that is in their heads, and when they're hearing about candidates, how do you understand what they are basing decisions on?

32:39So last time I was on the show to pull a deep cut, I talked about this book, The Reasoning Voter, that marshaled a lot of, I think, persuasive evidence that has not been shaken by the last few years. That for voters who are paying attention to other things, the things that they learn about a particular candidate are like stars in the sky. And if they see a few stars, they draw a line around those stars and draw a constellation. And that's their picture of who that candidate is. And once a star's in the sky, you cannot get someone to unsee that star. The most that a campaign can hope to do is to add a couple of stars that allow you to draw a different constellation.

33:17That's a very abstract way of saying. for all the many, many issues, most of the issues that a candidate talks about, has positions on, are not going to play any role in the election. It's going to be the one or two, really probably not three things that crystallize what it seems like this person's about. I remember vividly in 2004, George W. Bush decided that John Kerry was a flip-flopper. And he drove home that message over and over and over. And once you're a flip-flopper, it doesn't matter what you say your positions on the issues are because you can't trust that person to hold that position the next day.

33:52That was message discipline that allowed people to not trust the Democratic nominee. And the Obama campaign in 2012 was a masterclass in defining Mitt Romney, who many Democrats now pine for as a Republican opponent, but defining him as someone who is ripping off working people, was on the side of the wealthy against the middle class. That was the central issue. And so many, many other issues were not relevant. And I think that as we think about each election cycle, there's a few issues that become the central things that determine whether someone's trusted, whether someone's a threat, whether someone's on your side.

34:27And it's not as simple as left or right. At this moment, it's often top versus bottom or trusting institutions people feel have failed versus recognizing and speaking to the truth that they do need to fundamentally change. The GOP has announced they're going to run a campaign of hate that they're actually has had this report that they're going to run a campaign trying to make this about, you know, Democrats holding disqualifyingly left-wing views. And the question is, will that be more salient for voters, that Republican message, than this fundamental question of whether you're supporting an administration that is both ripping people off and terrorizing them across the country?

35:03And that giant arm wrestling match between which of those stars burns more brightly in the sky will ultimately determine the outcome of the midterms. Why does Ron Johnson keep winning elections in Wisconsin? So that's very painful. He's our U.S. Senator. I think part of the magic of Ron Johnson is that he's had the very good luck of being on the ballot once in 2010 when there was a historic GOP wave, once in 2016 when Donald Trump swept in and Johnson had both mega voters and traditional Republican voters at a time when the Republican Party was riven in the state of Wisconsin. And then the last time was 2022, which had a Democratic president.

35:45He won by one percentage point, but he did well enough that he was able to pull it off. So at one level, it's that. I also think that Ron Johnson holds teletown halls all the time. He speaks to the concerns of people who feel that they're marginalized from the political system. I don't like this at all. He's a huge vaccine skeptic and COVID vaccine skeptic. I totally disagree with him about those issues, but there are a lot of people who see him speaking to concerns that they have that they feel they've been made fun of for or excluded from public life for, and he's a champion on their side. And I think noticing when people feel unheard and sticking up for them is smart politics, even if he's propagating views that I think have led to the loss of life in my state.

36:25So there are aspects of how Ron Johnson comports himself politically that I think are smart politics. And I think that one thing that he's good at, that Tammy Baldwin's very, very good at is a lot of listening. That's part of how you win in a state like Wisconsin that has almost perfectly evenly divided voters across the two parties. And any pocket of 20, 30 ,000 votes could actually tilt a statewide election one way or the other. The Republican Party mostly listens to Donald Trump right now. And as Democrats, I think our job, and for anyone who believes in democracy, it's to listen to voters and connect with the things that matter most to them.

37:02I think one question here that people have is what it would mean for the Democratic Party to listen to voters. So that's sort of heartbreaking for Wisconsin Democrats, for national Democrats, Senate race in 2022. Heartbreaking for Wisconsinites. Where Mandela Barnes loses to Ron Johnson, the campaign against Barnes is, I'd say, kind of borderline racist. That's an understatement at best. There you go. Darkened his skin tone in their mail. Yes. And, you know, goes very hard on painting Barnes as soft on crime, right? That's a major attack Johnson uses, and I think to some real effect. And Democrats won Senate races that year, and Johnson was able to survive in that category.

37:40It was not a year that was such an incredible year for Republican Senate candidates. Now in the governor's race in Wisconsin, and you're seeing versions of this play out in other parts of the country, you have Barnes running again, and you have in Hong a candidate, Welda Barnes left, who has made, I think, more expansive statements that you could paint us soft on crime. So I think this is something I've been trying to get at a bit, which is there was an old Democratic Party that might kind of look at the situation and say that it's nominating convention. Look, we tried Barnes a couple of years ago.

38:13It didn't work. This is what we think the Wisconsin voter needs. Primaries work very differently. Primaries in the algorithmic contention age work very differently. But I think one of the things the Democratic Party is going to have to wrestle with is whether or not primaries are leading to sort of electorally optimal candidates. And so this is what I'm trying to get a little bit with this question of what does the voter want? But given what you've seen and given your point about the reasoning voter, I guess it's a question of even if the Democratic Party, like to the extent such a thing exists, wants to listen to the voter, can it?

38:50There are five candidates for governor in Wisconsin right now, and they represent kind of the big part of the range of the Democratic spectrum. And they're vying for support from voters. They're vying to get donors to chip in so they can put their ads on the air. That process will play out for another couple of weeks. And then we'll have this blitz sprint through November to define what the election is fundamentally about. And however someone might feel about the choices of the voters in the primary, I do think, you know, I want to underline for people that even when you can't imagine that an election is going to be close in Wisconsin, it's often incredibly close.

39:33It often comes down to the final ballots that are counted through the Milwaukee Central Count System. It comes down to the margins in red rural counties that have voted 70 % for the GOP, but this time they vote 68 % and you're able to win. there are voters all across our state who are furious about the way things are right now who have not yet been reached by any message from either candidate and i genuinely think there's a path to victory in whichever configuration we come out of the democratic primary but i will also say that the risk in an autocracy is not just the lack of freedom that people have when one person gets to make the decisions.

40:16It's also that throughout history, throughout the history of political parties, throughout the history of the world, when one or a tiny group of people gets to call the shots, they can get things terribly wrong and people have no recourse. And for all the messiness and all the challenge and all the disagreements that people have in a democracy, I think there's something incredibly sacred about protecting that fundamental principle. And as you can see, I'm not participating in the debate about who should win the Democratic primary in Wisconsin. but I'm fiercely protecting the principle that this should actually be up to the voters.

40:47It is, I hope we win every election. I hope that people who believe in democracy win every possible election in 26, but part of the lessons that will be drawn from 26 will inform an open primary process in 2028 for who the next democratic presidential candidate could be. And that's an important and valuable process as well. This is, this is an iterated process where each time you learn lessons from the last, you learn lessons from where things stand now and then paint forward to the next one. And I think there's a healthy debate both about how the Democratic Party should operate and which kind of Democrats voters should support in these primaries, but I think we should preserve the advance that we made in political technology of actually having a process where the public gets to weigh in.

41:26I think that partly because we're in this moment of collapsed public trust, that having systems that are manifestly and clearly and genuinely accountable to the public is vital to being able to preserve enough legitimacy to be able to move forward. And this is a moment when our democracy is under threat writ large. And I think this is a moment where people pouring themselves into the project of winning a contest in a democracy and ensuring that people who want the rules to give everyone a voice win those elections is absolutely vital. You ran for national DNC chair after the 2024 election. What was your pitch to the DNC delegates.

42:04It's a funny experience to run for DNC chair. I bet actually. I compared it to a cross between a student council election and a papal conclave. You're running a national campaign, you're crisscrossing the country, and you're talking to around 400 voters. When I ran, I found that there was actually the basis for a common message and a common vision around year-round organizing that took place everywhere to fight for every level of the ballot and a message that was centrally focused on this overriding economic concern that people feel across race and ethnicity across the country in red areas and blue areas and purple areas alike.

42:40That gave me a lot of hope for where we could go as a party. I also found that the DNC's voters were a lot like voters in maybe any context, which is familiarity and trust was a huge factor in how people made the decision. And to his credit in that election, Ken Martin had been building trust and building relationships with DNC members for years. He led the State Party Chairs Association. I've been focused on Wisconsin. I missed a lot of the State Party Chair Association meetings because I was in the middle of Supreme Court races in my state. And so I was the guy parachuting in two months before the election and saying, I've got a great idea, come with me.

43:16And people were like, yeah, that idea sounds great. And who are you again?

43:40I'm Wena Liu. I write the game Connections, one of the puzzles from New York Times games, and I love horror movies. I love my dog, and I love trying to trick you. I'm Sam Azersky, and I create the game Spelling Bee and Letterboxd on a daily basis. And I have this thing called Chromaesthesia. I see color when I'm listening to music. I'm Tracy Bennett. I get to pick the wordle word every day, which is not as easy as it sounds. The fun fact about me is that I am descended from a witch who was put on trial in Salem. Wow. Amazing. And I'm Joel Fogliano. I create your daily mini crossword. I've been making these puzzles for The Times for over 10 years now, which is like 3 ,000 minis.

44:20I am begging the universe for any new five-letter word. New York Times games are made by people, like the ones you just heard from. Go to nytimes.com slash games to start playing today. What's everyone's fastest mini time? Four seconds. No. What? I'll go find it. I have my screenshot somewhere.

44:42So as you note, the DNC chose Ken Martin. I think it is fair to say that the broad view is it has not been a successful tenure as DNC chair. I think he's had a very difficult time, sort of internal insurgencies, you know, kind of a debacle around the autopsy from the 2024 election. I think it actually speaks a little bit of what you're saying. I mean, Martin did win that election because he was more institutionally connected as a candidate. And to something we were talking about earlier, I think we're in a kind of strange moment for institutions, which is I think many of them are beginning or have been for some time failing.

45:18and that tends to make them defensive. An institution that is under stress is often not risk-taking and creative. It is scared and it retrenches. And this is not, I got my criticisms of Martin, but I also think it's a tough time to be DNC chair. But rather than ask you to criticize him, which I don't think you'll do, what do you think the DNC could be, right? If it moved into a position where it says, I mean, it is currently at a terrible fundraising disadvantage. It is a flailing organization. But just more broadly, going back to what we were discussing, I don't think there is a model for what a party can be in the 21st century that anybody is all that excited about yet nationally, right?

46:02The parties are not what they once were. You did a lot of work in Wisconsin building something I think that people actually were quite excited about. If you were advising a hypothetical DNC chair on what could be done, what do you think the Democratic Party could be if we're willing to sort of reinvent itself as machinery? Nancy Pelosi has a three item list for what it takes to win elections. She says it's message, money and mobilization. When you ask someone out in the street what they wish the Democratic Party did differently, usually the first thing that they will say is messaging. It's something about how Democrats can never say what they mean.

46:40They're always going through a laundry list. They should get it down to a bumper sticker. They should have one clear thing that every Democrat says. And if we did that, we'd be able to win elections. And while I appreciate that, and I think at this moment, affordability, in fact, is the one word bumper sticker that Democrats are running on across the country. It's actually not something that the party is in a position to enforce or create. Ultimately, candidates, what they say, what they say in their ads and their speeches and the media coverage they get, the people who will wield power if they're elected, they, through their actions and their messages, they define the brand ultimately in the biggest possible way.

47:12So I don't think that message is the thing that the Democratic Party organization can solve. Money is actually a significant one. And it's worth saying, and I speak frankly in the book, that part of how we've been able to be successful in Wisconsin at the Democratic Party is by raising a lot of money. In the book, I talk about the Scott Walker loophole, a Wisconsin law that allows the state parties to fund state candidates to an unlimited degree. That was part of how Scott Walker won his re-election. So the Democratic Party of Wisconsin can receive big donations and then make big donations to state candidates that allow them to fight back, even when Elon Musk comes to town, as you might remember him doing in our Supreme Court race.

47:52Now the same thing is on the table for the National Party and National Party committees. The U.S. Supreme Court has changed federal laws to allow the national parties to play a bigger role with their money than they did before. There used to be limits for what a party organization could do for a candidate for House or Senate, those limits have been obliterated. And for better or worse, until there's big changes in the Supreme Court or the Constitution, we're in an era where money does matter and the party using money effectively, I think, is one of the essential things for the party to do. But the last and biggest thing that any person can do, whether or not they're a trillionaire or a thousandaire or have negative net worth, the thing that any person can do of any generation, no matter what geography they live in across the country, is they can help to build the Democratic Party as a home for people who want to organize to make a positive difference and build the trust at the local level in their community that can make especially a difference on the races that nobody's paying attention to.

48:52In a lot of elections, voters find out who the candidate is when they walk into the polling place. For state legislative races, most people have no idea who their state representative or state senator is. Most people have no idea who the city council candidate is or the candidate for district attorney in their county. Often, there's an experience many people have. They see those names on the ballot and they think, who am I going to text to ask who I'm supposed to vote for in this election? And I do think that there's a meaningful and incredibly powerful thing for a party to build a network of folks who are that trusted person who people text and ask who they should vote for.

49:28I read about a North Carolina state Supreme Court race that the Democratic candidate lost by 401 votes. That led to the re-gerrymandering of the state and the United States Republican House majority now because Republicans picked up enough seats there. And if you'd been in North Carolina with a group of friends, you could have produced the margin of victory in that election. So even though it is the case that for candidates, it's a very different environment now because it's not enough to win over the editorial board of your local newspaper, if you can effectively become the editorial board for some people in your community or support people who are going to be that editorial board in a place where elections come down to a hairline, you can have a huge impact on what happens next.

50:09And the secret sauce for the Democratic Party of Wisconsin, on one hand, it's been using the Scott Walker loophole and the financial laws to fight back against a GOP that is funded by much wealthier people who are spending a huge amount of money in our state. But it's also been that we've built hundreds of neighborhood teams across our state that actually know everyone in their community, that in places with apartment buildings, they have someone who will unlock the door and let them in so they can check in with everyone on the hallway. They know who actually is going to be on their farms at different times of year.

50:39You know, they know everyone along the main street and which businesses would be willing to put a poster in the window. In small towns across the state of Wisconsin, building that kind of deep, thick year-round organizing from the bottom up is something that any person can get involved in their local party organization and create that every state party potentially could do. And although it does cost some money to do, it's so much cheaper than running an ad hundreds of times on broadcast television in order to reach a tiny fraction of the voters who might be relevant in a particular race. So I do think there's something, in fact, for all of us to do who think this is bigger than any one election, one office, one candidate, which is to build power at the community level.

51:22And the Democratic Party can be a vessel for that work that can be transferred and moved from election to election in service of people who believe in the idea of democracy itself. One of the most common frustrations I hear from listeners of the show and just politically engaged people who find my email is, look, we're sitting here talking in a podcast studio in Manhattan. Some of the people listening may live in Wisconsin or Michigan or North Carolina, and a lot of them live in California or New York or New Jersey or Vermont. And they say, I don't know how to matter here. I'm in a blue state.

52:01My state has Democrats statewide up and down. I'm worried about Donald Trump, if that's their politics. And I don't really think writing letters to people in Wisconsin, I don't think people are super excited to get my letter writing in the mail. Well, what does it mean to try to be useful and engaged in this moment if you don't live in a state that swings, if you don't live in a place where elections are decided by a percentage point or two? So there are people in New York and California and across the country who go through a training with our state party and learn how to staff the voter protection hotline so that when a Wisconsin voter finds out that they can no longer mail in their absentee ballot and and they want to know where they can drop it off, they call this number.

52:47And lo and behold, there's someone on the other line who walks them through the process. And that person just helped ensure that a voter could successfully cast a ballot in a swing state that might come down to three votes per precinct. There are ways to volunteer like that. There's another thing called giving circles where you get a group of friends together. Everyone puts in 50 bucks. Not everyone has 50 bucks, but if you and your friends do, you can help sponsor a state legislative candidate in a state where the state legislature is on the brink of winning a majority, the state's project organizes these giving circles around the country.

53:17There's another group called Movement Voter Project that does the same thing that could have a gigantic effect on whether you fortify election laws and protections before the 2028 election. There are essentially, you have to plug in to effectively run organizing efforts. I want to hold you on this for a minute because actually there's some people who email me this question all the time, which is they get a million very loud emails, as we were talking about earlier, about where to donate, and they don't know what is a grift, what is maybe well-meaning but ineffective, and what is effective. So on the Republican side, I am sad to say that the Republican State Leadership Committee has been devilishly effective for a lot longer than a lot of the groups on the Democratic side.

54:00A group that is relatively low profile that does amazing work that I'd recommend is the the State and Local Election Alliance, S-L-E-A, which is pronounced SLEA, which I love having an acronym that you can actually pronounce. Not enough Democratic-aligned groups do that. They zero in on the democracy-critical state and local races, and then they do very smart and strategic things to support the people who are working on those fights. SLEA has made a difference in Wisconsin and a whole bunch of other states. The States Project does amazing work. I think the Democratic Attorneys General Association, also Dynamite Attorneys General, are suing Trump over and over, often working with outside groups, democracy defenders as a group that I'm an advisor for that does amazing work in court.

54:44There's Protect Democracy and Democracy Forward. You might find a common thread in the word democracy in each of those. These are organizations that are working alongside elected officials. I think they've been one of the most successful lines of resistance to the Trump administration. But this is a big, complicated picture. I compare it to an electrical grid where if you short out one substation, the lights flicker in the next neighborhood. American political power is like that. It's a system where certain offices, you'd never expect the state representative from Onalaska, Wisconsin to be one of the most important elected officials in the country.

55:18But his ability to win when Republicans had drawn hyper-gerrymandered maps prevented Republicans from getting a supermajority in the Wisconsin state legislature. If they had won that supermajority, they could have destroyed the Wisconsin Elections Commission and guaranteed future victories for themselves. But he won in a district that went for Trump. And because of him and Lori Palmeri in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, Governor Evers was able to veto the Republican attack laws trying to threaten democracy. And Wisconsin had a free and fair election in 2024. All these different parts that add up to the system of who gets to write the rules of our democracy, which then dictates in whose interests our democracy actually works.

55:54And I hope that the idea of an economy that works for everyone, that everyone's rights and freedoms are protected and that we have a democracy. Those are the three core unifying ideas behind the Democratic Party. And I hope people who believe in those things will throw them into the work of building something bigger than any one race. I think it's a good place to end. Always our final question. What are three books you'd recommend to the audience? So the first book I want to recommend is The Master of the Senate by Robert Caro. I talk in the book about the fight in Wisconsin and the way that we unrigged our state, which wound up requiring the flipping of the state Supreme Court.

56:30At a national level, if we want to reform, expand the U.S. Supreme Court, if we want to pass a new Voting Rights Act, if we want to ban partisan gerrymandering, the only way to do it is by abolishing the filibuster and changing the way the U.S. Senate works. And Robert Caro's book talks about the U.S. Senate at a time when it was totally moribund, nothing was passing. And then a senator came along who helped to make the whole thing actually function and started passing laws that people thought could never have been passed. I think there's something to learn from that about how to reinvigorate this institution that is currently where policy goes to die.

57:03Not all policies, but many policies that we need. The second book that I want to recommend is a book called Seeing Like a State. And this is a book by someone who used to be a University of Wisconsin professor, actually, GMC Scott. And it's about the ways that utopian projects often fall apart and totally backfire. He talks a lot about how governments sometimes look at this sort of high-level view, the synoptic view, the view from above, and come up with a game plan. And then when it actually happens, it plays out disastrously. I think Elon Musk and Doge is a perfect example of that that's now costing millions.

57:40Just give me the passwords. Yeah, exactly. I can see the whole thing through the passwords and the data transmissions. And millions of people are probably going to die. Hundreds of thousands have already died as a result. And I think for people who want big positive change, as I do, there's something incredibly important about having a level of humility and a capacity to listen and learn about what is actually going on. But also, the thing that defines the worst catastrophes, it's always this combination of a kind of plan imposed from above and a lack of democracy that means that the people who are affected have no ability to demand recourse.

58:19You have famines in, famously, Amartya Sen, the Nobel Prize winning economist, wrote about this. The only famines have been in places that are not democracies. If the people who are starving to death have a voice and a vote, then they can create enough noise that they ultimately get the food that keeps them alive. And seeing like a state, I think, was very helpful for me in thinking about what it takes to have the suppleness and the accountability to be able to create positive change by looking at the examples of when things have gone disastrously wrong. And then the third book I want to recommend is probably my favorite book these days to read to my kids, which is a book called Sal and Gabby Break the Universe.

58:58And what I love about this book, it's set in the near future. There are AIs that are triply involved in the kids' lives, but it's a future that is actually positive and hopeful as opposed to the kind of Elon Musk controlled totalitarian techno state that he, his rise seems to pretend. It's a, it's a deeply inclusive vision of the future. It's something that is full of like art and culture and it is a delight. And my kids love listening to it and laughing to it. And I love it too. So if you want something that paints a picture about how things can actually be better than they are now, which is in such disastrously short supply, Sal and Gabby Break the Universe is a great place to start.

59:41Ben Booker, thank you very much. Thanks for having me on.

1:00:02Thank you.